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Opioid use in cancer patients compared with non-cancer pain patients in a veterans population. JNCI cancer spectrum Mudumbai, S. C., He, H., Chen, J. Q., Kapoor, A., Regala, S., Mariano, E. R., Stafford, R. S., Abnet, C. C., Pfeiffer, R. M., Freedman, N. D., Etemadi, A. 2024

Abstract

Opioid safety initiatives may secondarily impact opioid prescribing and pain outcomes for cancer care.We reviewed electronic health record data at a tertiary Veterans Affairs system (VA Palo Alto) for all patients from 2015-2021. We collected outpatient Schedule II opioid prescriptions data and calculated morphine milligram equivalents (MMEs) using CDC conversion formulas. To determine the clinical impact of changes in opioid prescription, we used the highest level of pain reported by each patient on the 0 to 10 Numeric Rating Scale (NRS) in each year, categorized into mild (0-3), moderate (4-6), and severe (7 and above).Among 89,569 patients, 9073 had a cancer diagnosis. Cancer patients were almost twice as likely to have an opioid prescription compared with non-cancer patients (69.0% vs 36.7%, respectively). The proportion of patients who received an opioid prescription decreased from 27.1% to 18.1% (trend p?

View details for DOI 10.1093/jncics/pkae012

View details for PubMedID 38457606